What they do
“In today’s web, personalisation is king – and what could be more personal for shoppers than having your very own tailored online store?” This was the thinking of Chris Morton when he co-founded Lyst in 2010.

Chris was VC investor at Benchmark Capital and Balderton for several years, focusing on early-stage consumer internet space and witnessing one of the biggest problems of the industry, ie. shopping cart abandonment. Together with Sebastjan Trepca, who had more than 20 years of engineering and product experience, he set out to create a state-of-the-art technology marketplace.

Today, Lyst is an inventory-free platform that uses its proprietary data engine to provide each customer (150M per year) with a highly-personalised, simpler, more engaging and better buying experience. Over 17,000 brands and retailers partner with Lyst to drive meaningful sales within a highly trusted environment. Lyst is also a unique source of fashion data insights, and is responsible for the Lyst Index, the industry leading report of the hottest brands and products worldwide. Lifetime GMV is now over $2bn.

How we met
We first met with Chris Morton, Lyst’s Founder & CEO, back in 2014 when Pascal and Boris conducted an in-depth 6 months review of NET-A-PORTER which was already a Lyst partner.
Seven years later, he reached out to us to catch up and share Lyst’s tremendous progress, having built the world’s largest fashion assortment on a single tech platform and harnessed the power of data to support a much broader vision.

Along their growth path, Chris and the team succeeded in rallying top-tier investors to their cause: Draper Esprit, 14W, Accel, Balderton Capital, LVMH. He had already secured the commitments of Novator Partners, certain funds managed by Fidelity Investments among others for his pre-IPO round of $85m, but he absolutely wanted us to be a part of the story too. That’s how, after a thorough due diligence, we had the privilege to join the round!